This essay originally
served to introduce an 8-minute film, “Byron’s Messolonghi,”
directed by Rosa Florou and YiannisGianakopoulos.As the film begins, the camera approaches Messolonghi
from the Gulf of Patras, as
Byron would have in 1823. Against a backdrop of music by the Greek composer Skalcotas, it presents visual images of the town’s natural
setting and ecology, the region’s archaeological remains, historical and
cultural vestiges of pre-ExodosMessolonghi,
and commemorations of Byron and of the Exodos.The film concludes with exterior and interior
views of Byron House, a replica of Byron’s residence during the last months of
his life, which now serves as headquarters for the Messolonghi
Byron society’s Research Center with its library, collection of engravings,
ethnic Greek costumes, and other memorabilia, and research and teaching
spaces.“Byron’s Messolonghi”
can be viewed on the website of the Messolonghi Byron
Society, http://www.messolonghibyronsociety.gr.

Edward Trelawny claims that Byron told him, “If I am a
poet—Gifford says I am; I doubt it--the air of Greece has made me one.I climbed to the haunts of Minerva and the
Muses.”1AlthoughTrelawny was not an invariably
reliable reporter and the words of this supposed Byronic pronouncement, even if
accurate, are somewhat more slippery than they at first might seem, there is
palpable truth at its heart. The comment to Trelawny
figures in a conversation during which Byron contrasts himself and his friend
John Cam Hobhouse as Greek travelers.When the two arrived in Greece in 1809, they
were much more alike than different as far as status and interests went: a pair
of skeptical, adventurous young Cambridge graduates--sons of the ruling class
but not particularly well connected in the circles of fashion or the corridors
of power--politically interested liberals who had not yet made a mark in
official Whig circles--deft versifiers, well trained at Harrow, Westminster,
and Cambridge in classical imitatio, whose works had not yet made a deep impression on
the English reading public. Back from their travels in 1811, Byron “woke up
famous” (as his famous phrase goes) with the publication of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, his loco-descriptive Spenserian take on the tour.Hobhouse, laboring
over minute linguistic and topographical details for A Journey through Albania and other provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople,
during the Years 1809 and 1810, found that unglamorous “plain prose” was to
be his fate.Thus the picturesque
polarity of scholarly consensus—sublimely soaring homme
fatal and andcommonsensically
down-to-earth wing-man—established itself.And thus it has endured.

Something about the two
friends’ different responses to being in Greece seems to have played a
crucial role in their diverging paths.Byron and Hobhouse both were Philhellenes
keenly alive to the wonders of a place incomparably rich in sites sacred to
myth and history, a landscape and seascape that they, like many other
Europeans, cherished as the cradle of their cultural heritage.But at the time Hobhouse
viewed Greece
from a predominantly antiquarian vantage point.Byron, more in touch with the spirit of the place than in search of
facts about its associations, opened himself to sublimity—and he received its
gifts.For Byron in Greece, the eye
was window of the soul in a way that reverses the conventional image: what he
saw entered into a sensibility made receptive by classical education and did
not provoke scholarly or antiquarian questions but instead stirred his creative
spirit. On December 14, 1809, for instance, the view of MountParnassus,
sacred to Apollo and the Muses, gave Byron a more vital sense of the poetry it
inspired than all his classical reading had previously offered.The electric thrill of having been on the
spot is what spurred him to ask in a letter to Henry Drury of their mutual
friend the Cambridge
tutor and poet Francis Hodgson, “what would he give? To have seen like me the real
Parnassus”?2Throughout his life Byron cherished the
memories having been at Delphi and having climbed the slopes of Parnassus.Long
afterward, he recorded his experience there in the “Detached Thoughts” of
1821-22 and explicitly connected it with his poetic vocation:

Upon Parnassus going to the fountain of Delphi (Castri) in 1809—I saw a flight of twelve Eagles—(Hobhouse says they are Vultures—at least in
conversation)—and I seized the Omen.—On the day before, I composed the lines to
Parnassus—(in Childe Harold) and on beholding the birds—had a hope—that Apollo
had accepted my homage… (BLJ IX, 41)

In Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, Byron places so high a value on having seen the real Parnassus that his poem’s narrator
fast-forwards to that experience while Harold is still in Spain. Parnassus’s rocky reality does not exclude its literary
associations, but sublime actuality is what dominates. The mountain need not
shelter the mythic Muses, for it serves as muse in its own right:

Oh, thou Parnassus!Whom I now survey,

Not in the phrenzy of
a dreamer’s eye,

Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,

But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,

In the wild pomp of mountain-majesty!

What marvel if I thus essay to sing?

The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by

Would gladly woo thine
Echoes with his string,

Though from thy heights
no more one Muse will wave her wing. (I, st.
60)3

Voicing this response to
the concrete presence of “mountain-majesty,” Byron resembles his fellow
Romantic poets who, however democratic their politics or however lofty their
personal aspirations, come to accept the limited nature of the human senses and
intellect as they submit to natural sublimity. Remember Wordsworth, befuddled
in Book VI of the Thirteen-Book Prelude as he crosses the watershed of
the Alps without being alerted by his unreliable physical senses to what his
mind had imagined would be a memorable achievement, then blindsided by
sublimity on his descent, as heights, chasms, cataracts, waterfalls, and winds
delineate “Characters of the great Apocalypse,/ The types and symbols of
eternity,/The first,and last, and midst, and without end” (VI,
570-72).4Or recall
Wordsworth seven books later “in midst/ of circumstance most awful and sublime”
(bk. XIII, l. 76; p. 514), befogged as he
ascends Mount Snowdon and then moonstruck on the
reaching the summit, which seems to be an island set in a silver sea of
clouds.Or think of Shelley awed by the
ideal power merely shadowed forth by “the everlasting universe of things” in
his lyric “Mont Blanc.”From the Romantic poet’s vantage point, a
sublime mountain experience is not something to be managed by the rational mind
seeking to order and control perceptions, as Hobhouse
“would potter with map and compass at the foot of Pindus,
Parnes, and Parnassus” (Trelawny
I, 47). Instead it must be received, digested, and eventually re-membered.

So assimilated, nature’s
sublimity nourishes the poetic spirit in an uncontrolled but deeply sustaining
way, as Byron understood when he gazed at MountParnassus,
scribbled no notes, and posed no questions.Byron’s most overtly Romantic—and, one might say, least byronic—avowal
of this sublime and subliminal truth comes in Book III of Childe Harold,
with its record of the Swiss summer of 1816.Influenced by Shelley’s companionship and perhaps through him by
Wordsworth’s ideas, Byron at that time could straightforwardly offer a narrator
who professes “I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me; and to me/ High
mountains are a feeling” (III, st. 72; CPW II, 103) and poses such rhetorical questions as
“Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part/ Of me and of my soul, as I of
them?” and “…should I not contemn/All
objects, if compared with these…?”(III, st. 75; CPW
II, 104-05).After the fact,
Byron facetiously deprecated the third canto as “a fine indistinct piece of
poetical desperation” and characterized himself as “half-mad during the time of
its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare
of my own delinquencies.” (BLJV, 165) But however
sheepish he may later have felt for having fallen so fully and so eloquently
under a spell like the one that bewitched and habitually inspired Wordsworth,
the rugged landscape of Greece
had long since worked upon his mind in a comparable way. In fact, its
atmosphere had set him on his poetical path to sublimity if the reported claim
concerning “the air of Greece” is to be trusted—and in light of what Byron says
of the poetic omen that marked his Parnassian trek as a vocation, Trelawny’s report rings true.

As an elegantly
symmetrical fate would have it, the first Greek landscape Byron viewed from
terra firma was also the last his dying eyes would see: a mixture of craggy
mountains and marshy flats spanned by a broad sky whose changing light was
reflected in calm lagoon waters and the rougher seas of the Gulf of Patras.On September 26, 1809, his first day on Greek
soil, Byron landed on the Peloponnesian side of the gulf and from there saw the
fishing huts of the small community called Messolonghi,
so named for its situation in the lagoon.Byron entered Messolonghi almost two months
later, en route from the wilds of Albania
to Athens. On
January 4, 1824, Byron returned to Messolonghi, now
the western center of the Greek revolution against the Ottoman
Empire.This time, Byron
set foot on mainland Greece as official representative of the London Greek
Committee—no youthful Grand Tourist but a purposeful man who had come to devote
his talents, fortune, and life to a cause.The humble town that he came to know well in the last months of his life
is today mostly gone, destroyed in the heroically tragic Exodos
of 1826.But the sublime landscape that
may well have sustained Byron in dark times is essentially unchanged.Looking south and west from the Messolonghi waterfront, one can see the mountains of Morea and the Ionian islands of Cephalonia, Ithaka,
and Zante that Byron could have viewed from his upper
windows.Stark, cave-riddled MountVarassova looms to the
east.The chapel of the Virgin of the
Palms, goal of Byron’s habitual evening ride, reposes in tranquility on an isle
in the lagoon that continues to mirrors sunsets as rich as those Byron would
have seen.The contours, colors, play of
light, and vast expanses of stony mountains, water,
and sky are now as they were in 1824:modern development has done comparatively little to interfere with the
district’s natural beauty and sublimity.

If we can appreciate
much the same landscape that Byron saw as he first breathed the air of mainland
Greece
and as, expiring, he breathed his last, can we also experience it
unmediated?Or has Byron’s seeing Greece and
saying what he saw preempted a direct response to the myth-saturated landscape
in subsequent generations of readers and travelers who come in his footsteps to
savor the Hellenic sublime?Can the
“fabled landscape of a lay” whose best if not last minstrel was Byron be simply
seen for what it is?Perhaps not, and perhaps some pilgrims would not want it so.But perhaps the Greek sublime is such that
even the most eloquent subjectivity is silenced, if not forgotten, in its
presence. See for yourself.Test the truth
of Henry Miller’s claim: “In Greece
the rocks are eloquent: men may go dead but the rocks never.”5

Notes

1 Edward Trelawney, Records
of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1878, reissued 1968), I, 48.Subsequent citation will refer to this
edition and will appear parenthetically.Early in his memoir, Trelawney reports that Byrorn
“often said, if he had ever written a line worth
preserving, it was Greece
that inspired it” (I, 37).